Book Review: Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Server, by David Smiley and Eric PughSolr is the search engine we embed into our products at work, and it's long been an area I needed to learn about. Unfortunately this isn't an ideal book by any means from which to learn. Despite the blurb on the back cover, it's neither "comprehensive" (how can it be when it frequently refers you to the Web for "the details") nor accessible to someone without quite a bit of prior knowledge. I don't think the authors are entirely to blame for this; clearly it was reviewed by people who hadn't spotted unwritten assumptions either. The internal training presentation I've seen at work fills in enough of the gaps to make the book useful, and I think it will be a useful reference in due course. Unfortunately it hasn't really got any competition unless you're prepared to back off to Apache Lucene, the underlying technology on which Solr is built.